What's going on in the Best Food Blog category?

[julie]

In the last few hours, Cake Wrecks has received many hundreds of votes...169 in the last 10 minutes, around 3000 since late this afternoon. This seems suspicious to me.

[Sean Gleeson]

If any fraudulent votes were cast, they will be deleted. But a big surge in votes is not implausible or uncommon, when a blog that gets a lot of traffic puts up a post that promotes the contest. Cake Wrecks does not post any sitemeter data, but according to Alexa, Cake Wrecks is a very popular blog, although not as widely read as Serious Eats.

Serious Eats posted about the contest Monday evening, and saw a surge in votes, to take an early lead. But then Cake Wrecks posted about the contest this afternoon, and garnered enough votes to take take the lead from Serious Eats. The Cake Wrecks post was a good case study in how to write a post that encourages voting, with detailed instructions and screenshots, and numerous calls to action. I have found that bloggers who write posts like that tend to get good results.

[julie]

Well, almost 3400 votes in less than 6 hours is pretty impressive!

[andrewgurn]

Man who would eve read a food blog anyway? They all deserve to lose.

[Kevin Aylward]

Jan 6, 2009 20:11:21 GMT -5 julie said:

Well, almost 3400 votes in less than 6 hours is pretty impressive!

Well we do make it easy to vote , but yes it's impressive.

[cornbreadbreath]

84.0% of the vote? Every time I refresh that page there's several more votes under Cake Wrecks (a steady stream of them). Alexa shows Serious Eats as commanding, on average, about 50% more traffic than Cake Wrecks. Now, not that it necessarily means Serious Eats will get more votes for the "Best" food blog, but both have a small link to the voting on their navigation menu - and I doubt there would be such a discrepancy.

Something smells fishy.

[Sean Gleeson]

Serious Eats gets more visitors than Cake Wrecks... but a pertinent question is, what sort of visitors are they each getting? It might be that many Serious Eats readers are largely coming to look up a recipe or something, and then moving on. I notice that of all the posts on Serious Eats, there are very few comments from readers. A few here and a few there, and several posts have no comments at all. In stark contrast, the Cake Wrecks posts all have lots of comments -- the one about the Weblog Awards has 176. This suggests to me that the Cake Wrecks readers are more engaged, more devoted, more personally attached to the website. They would be more likely to take the trouble to vote.

Another thing to consider is RSS subscribers. Alexa tracks visits to the websites, but not people who subscribe to the feed. It might be that many Cake Wrecks subscribers are just reading the RSS in their feed readers, without hitting the site.

And the way the two sites promoted the contest is similar, but also distinctly different. They both have an announcement in the sidebar, but look at the headlines. The Serious Eats box says: "Serious Eats Nominated for 2008 Weblog Award in Food." A reader who just browsed the headlines might just think, "Oh, how nice for them," without realizing that she should go vote. But the headline of the Cake Wrecks box says "CLICK ON THE BADGE TO VOTE FOR CAKE WRECKS!" Putting the call to action in the headline can make all the difference in the world.

Finally, consider the impact of other blogs. Not everyone who votes in this category is coming from Serious Eats or Cake Wrecks. Some are coming from other blogs, whose authors endorsed Cake Wrecks. (For instance, The Anchoress did, and she is very widely read.)

And some voters are just wandering in to look at the polls, following a few links to see the blogs, and making a snap decision. I would imagine that Cake Wrecks is doing well among this sort of voter.

In short, there are perfectly legitimate explanations for such a result as we're seeing. Naturally, if any fraudulent votes are detected, they will be purged. But fraud is the least plausible theory at this point.

[rocks]

Non evidence of cheating is persuasive but you have to take into account statistical anomalies.
Sites like Cake Wrecks and Fivethrityeight are off the charts, beyond even the "major" categories. They are receiving many times the votes their entire category received in the past. The Anchoress may have endorsed Cake Wrecks but that does little to explain why it's received 9 times the votes she has. Votes for 538 are going up at a steady rate minute by minute.....at nearly 3 o'clock in the morning EST. The same for Cake Wrecks. I don't care how sure you are, someone is scamming your system and they have automated it. It may not be the bloggers themselves, but a dedicated fan. One thing is for sure, something is going on.

[rocks]

By the way, i am not a fan of any of the sites in these 2 categories and I don't blog. I have been voting in them but only because I was already here to vote. FWIW, it would be nice if you could move from category to category to vote without backing out to the main voting page.

[great]

I came here to vote via a link from one blog I read. I barely recognized any other blogs, but I still voted in each category, and I'm going to vote again tomorrow (if I remember), with less than consistent choices. There are certain blogs that cross-over their division, and I think Cake Wrecks is one of them. The blog I came to the site to vote for happened to come out in first place for its category and I had never heard of any other blogs in its category. If anyone is voting like I am, and I would hazard to guess this contest means hardly anything in that case, they would probably look over the stack of names and say, "that's funny." This contest should be called "Stack of Most Amusing Blog Titles, Indeterminate Topics, and Shallow Voters." Let's not forget to congratulate the host for getting a lot of hits.

There's no clappy hands icon. OK!

[rocks]

19000 and 21000....Cake Wrecks and 538 are the top 2 vote getters, by far, in ALL categories?

If you want to certify them as winners I say go right ahead but if certify those vote totals and I was a blogger, I would tell you to keep your nomination next year.

[johnthehubbyofjen]

Hi all!

This is john (the hubby of Jen) from Cake Wrecks. I'd like to clear up a few things that might help with the confusion and accusations going on here. Here goes...

1. I am not sure where Alexa gets their numbers or how old they are but yesterday, Cake Wrecks had just over 48,000 unique visitors and just under 100,000 page views. Again, I can't be sure of the numbers here but Alexa says that Serious Eats gets a lot less than that.

2. We have some of the most wonderfully loyal readers ever. When Jen puts out a call for a certain type of cake, we get literally hundreds of e-mail submissions in the first 24 hours. When she asked people to vote for their favorite humor blog on the Blogger's Choice Awards, she got about a thousand votes even though you had to go through an extremely time consuming sign-up process to even be able to cast your vote, and even then, you could only vote once.

3. We know we are in the wrong category. We were hoping for Best Humor Blog or maybe even Best New Blog since Cake Wrecks is only six months old but, even though we formally requested a change, we were told that it was impossible.

Finally, allow me to say that Serious Eats is an EXCELLENT website as are all of the food blogs nominated. Perhaps next year, Weblog Awards will put us in the right category. Until then, perhaps you guys could give our readers the benefit of the doubt. Just a thought..

john

[Sean Gleeson]

Howdy, John. Thank you for your elucidation. Cake Wrecks has earned a huge number of votes by being a great blog that people like to read, and want to show their support for. That is something to be proud of.

It may well turn out that some votes are fraudulent, and have to be deleted from the totals. If -- I repeat, if -- that is the case in this category, it still would not reflect badly on the bloggers or readers of Cake Wrecks or any of the other food blogs. Sometimes, hackers just like to mess with stuff, and are not in any way colluding with the contestants.

Here's a personal story. Four years ago, I was a blogger, and my blog was up for a 2004 Weblog Award. I was ahead in the polls, until Kevin discovered 177 fake votes that were cast for my blog, and deleted them, knocking me into a distant second place. Naturally, I was innocent of any vote-tampering, and so were all of my readers. Some creep had just sent in a bunch of fake votes apparently at random in several categories, for no reason at all except to vandalize the contest. I reckon I told that story to make two points: (1) even if some fake votes get through all our defenses, we still catch 'em and delete them; and (2) any fake votes found do not reflect blame upon the authors or readers of the contestant blogs.

[danto]

I've never voted for anything online - blog or otherwise - until Cake Wrecks. That blog provides immense entertainment, as a reader it's a small payback to cast a vote as requested. I'm not at all surprised at the voting results.

[fairyhedgehog]

I get Cake Wrecks on RSS feed so I don't think I'm included in the site statistics. I love that blog: the pictures and the commentary.

I don't actually comment simply because there are just too many other people commenting! I can't be the only one like this.